What the world really wants

[antares24]

This title at first could seem strange, but is the title of an article of newsweek, written by Fareed Zakaria, that i find interesting, here is the article, it's a bit long, but take a look at it:

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The Bush administration describes spreading democracy as the lodestar of its foreign policy. It speaks about democracy constantly and has expanded funding for programs associated with it.
The administration sees itself as giving voice to the hundreds of millions who are oppressed around the world. And yet the prevailing image of the United States in those lands is not at all as a beacon of liberty.
Public sentiment almost everywhere sees the United States as self-interested and arrogant.
There is a huge disconnect between what the Bush administration believes it stands for and how it is seen around the world.
Why? Well, consider Vice President Cheney's speech on May 4 in Lithuania, in which he accused Russia of backpedaling on democracy. Cheney was correct in his specific criticisms. If anything, he was coming a little late to this party. Senators like John McCain and Joe Lieberman have been making this case for more than a year. Russia watchers have been pointing to these trends for longer. But to speak as Cheney did last week misunderstands the reality in that country, and squanders America's ability to have an impact in it.

In Cheney's narrative, Russia was a blooming democracy during the 1990s, but in recent years it has turned into a sinister dictatorship where people live in fear. In castigating Vladimir Putin, Cheney believes that he is speaking for the Russian masses. He fancies himself as Reagan at the Berlin wall.
Except he isn't. Had Cheney done his homework and consulted a few opinion polls, which are extensive and reliable in Russia, he would have discovered that Putin has a 75 percent approval rating, about twice that of President Bush.

Most Russians see recent history differently. They remember Russia in the 1990s as a country of instability, lawlessness and banditry. They believe that Boris Yeltsin bankrupted the country, handed its assets over to his cronies and spent most of his time drunk and dysfunctional.
Yeltsin's approval ratings by 1994 were below 20 percent and in 1996 he actually went into the single digits for a while. Russians see Putin, on the other hand, as having restored order, revived growth and reasserted national pride.
Why? Well, for the average Russian per capita GDP has gone from $600 to $4,500 during Putin's reign, much, though not all of which, is related to oil prices. The poverty rolls have fallen from 42 million to 26 million.
College graduates have increased by 50 percent and a middle class has emerged in Russia's cities. And yet the backsliding that Cheney described is quite true, too. I've been critical of Putin power grabs for years now.
But the truth is that even so, Russia today is a strange mixture of freedom and unfreedom. (The country publishes 90,000 books a year, espousing all political views.) Polls in Russia show that people still rate democracy as something they like and value. But in the wake of the 1990s, they value more urgently conditions that will allow them to lead decent civic and economic lives. We went to Iraq with similar blinders, believing that all people thirsted for was the end of Saddam. But when that meant the end of order, stability and civilized life, they were horrified and blamed us. If we had paid attention to this fundamental (and conservative) insight, we might not be in the mess we are in today in Iraq.
Or consider Nigeria. American officials have been debating how to help that country, by ensuring that its elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, would not run for a third term (which would have required amending election laws). Last week the Nigerian Senate ruled out a third term, and Washington applauded.
But in fact this whole drama is largely irrelevant to what is really happening in Nigeria. Over the last 25 years, the country has gone into free fall. Its per capita GDP has collapsed, writes Jeffrey Tayler in the April issue of The Atlantic, from $1,000 to $390. It ranks below Haiti and Bangladesh on the Human Development Index.
In 2004 the World Bank estimated that 80 percent of Nigeria's oil wealth goes to 1 percent of its people. Sectarian tensions are rising, particularly between Muslims and Christians, and 12 of the country's 36 provinces have imposed Sharia. Violent conflict permeates the country, with 10,000 people dead over the last eight years.
In this context, Obasanjo's third term is really not the big issue that will determine Nigeria's future. (Obasanjo has actually presided over a series of important improvements, which will probably collapse in his absence.)
But these are the only issues that we talk about, because we're spreading democracy.

The United States should stand for and help promote freedom around the world. But we can do so effectively only if we ally ourselves with the aspirations of the people we are trying to help.
For many of them, the great struggle going on in so much of the world today is to end civil strife, corruption, extreme poverty and disease, which destroy not just democracy but society itself. And on those issues, I don't think I've ever heard a speech by Dick Cheney.

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a direct link: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12893650/site/newsweek/

What do you think of this? There is really this "huge disconnect between what the Bush administration believes it stands for and how it is seen around the world." ?
The bush administration it's really following ideology and principles, without looking at facts?
I belive that is so, and i 'm glad to hear what people here thinks.

IMPORTANT: this is not a bush-bashing tread, we have a lot of them in the past and i think that the ideas of everyone on bush are clear, this topic is about, as the title say, "What the world really want", and what the actual american administration believes on this matters (spreading of democracy) and what is happening in reality in the world.

Discuss :original:

[Hansa]

There is really this "huge disconnect between what the Bush administration believes it stands for and how it is seen around the world." ?

Short answer, yes there is. Most people or at least very many around the world believe that the reason for invading Iraq was the oil. Might not be correct, but people think so anyway. They did not invade in order to spread democracy anyway, that was not among the priorities until they discovered that the WMDs didn't exist.

The critique of Russia, is however as correctly pointed out by Zakaharia, correct, and the US generally stand together with the EU on this critisism. Again most Russians support Putins policies apart for a little elite. If the Russian state use illegal methods to steal private corporations from their owners, who stole it from the Russian people in the early 90's, I applaude the state. The finances gained from such acts, go to amongst other things raise the wages for judges and policemen, creating a situation where they are able to decline corruption and still feed their families. What this article said about the Russian sentiments seem quite correct, they want democracy, but not the right to vote, while the mafia controls their national resources. Most whould even welcome the Sovet Union back.

Back to the Bush administration, it is ceirtainly not the first American administration that has claimed to fight strongly for democracy, and to this day there has never been a US administration who has followed their beliefs in practice completeely. Bush, Clinton, Reagan etc, Who critisized Saudi Arabia, one of the most unfree countries on earth, and actually less free than Saddams Iraq in many areas (women rights etc). Reagan claimed to be a fighter for democracy, while fiercely fighting against it in South America, where the US has always supported fascist military dictatirships instead of popularly elected sosialist governments. The US stopped all critisism of extreme human rights abuses after Negroponte became ambassadeur in Cental America.

Today, lots of countries with dictators running them and supressing their polpulations in often terrible ways, are supported by both the USA and their Nato allies, just look at the countries surronding Afghanistan that we cooperate with. Where is the heavy critisism from Washington and Brussels?

In todays information society these facts are well known even outside the west. The US isn't fooling anyone (besides Americans only watching Fox) in the world. So the US government, while in some instances trying to act nobly as protectors and spreaders of democracy are not believed and mistrusted.

(by the way antares24, one of your userbars is really unnecesary. When you have a userbar stating that you are an Italian, the Women lover userbar is quite self-explanatory).

[antares24]

yes, i too, think that say that is a duty and a mission to spread democracy, and then supporting countries like saudi arabia, some despot in central asia ex-urss countries, and dictators like musharraf in pakistan, is not very coherent.
And let's not talk of ghedaffi in Lybia, a previous enemy of the west, but now that he have renounced to wmd research it's treated like a friend here in europe too
However the real problem in my opinion is the fact that it's seem that many in the u.s. administration belive that people would welcome them if they give "democracy", all the talk about the change in regime in Iran for example, start from the idea that the regime is highly unpopular, but in reality it has a lot of support
Ideology and false assumptions mustn't drive foreign policy...

i just read this:

(by the way antares24, one of your userbars is really unnecesary. When you have a userbar stating that you are an Italian, the Women lover userbar is quite self-explanatory).